Marriage of the Month: Ramadas

This one's for you, Clare! (And anyone else at EK Rochester who has gotten to know Ramadas.)
He's gone and gotten himself hitched...

I am always amazed at the casual-ness of Hindi weddings. They seem to mirror the chaos and fluidity of the city. There is a very long and elaborate ceremony, which sometimes starts before dawn. During the ceremony, the couple and the priests sit on a stage, facing the guests. But throughout the ceremony, many of the guests seem to be doing their own thing. In the back, businessmen chat and exchange business cards. Little boys run around the hall, roughhousing. Families step out to get a breakfast of idli, being served in an adjacent dining hall. People just come and go throughout the ceremony.

Anuradha and Ramadas

The very first wedding that I attended here, I kept waiting for the official ceremony to start. I didn't realize until about an hour into the wedding that the ceremony HAD started! The priest chants and the couple perform their complex rituals, but in the rest of the hall, everything seems very casual.

Skinny young Hindi priests crack jokes and laugh in between the rituals. At one point, an elderly woman (I believe she was the bride's grandmother?) gets into a (friendly) fight with the priest over the way he is doing a fertility ritual. The priest had instructed the couple to exchange a statue of Ganesh back and forth (below, left). The grandmother jumps onto the stage (below, right) to tell them, it's not done like that, the statue should be tied around the bride, she should carry it! [This symbolizes being pregnant.]They banter back and forth. I'm guessing grandmother knows a lot more about fertility than a young (probably celibate?) lad in his 20's, so I'm rooting for the grandmother on this one!

The couple pass a Ganesh statue back and forth

Coaching from an elder

Sometimes, the ceremony spills out onto the street. Here, the groom has been led out of the marriage hall and out onto the street, where he is having his feet washed and anointed by children, before being led back inside under an umbrella. (Not sure about the umbrella symbolism; it wasn't raining!)

Arvind, Vas, Rema & Umaya dining

Even with all the weddings I've attended already, the meals still makes me chuckle. Most weddings are huge (500 people is not unusual) and all of them are fed a traditional meal on banana leaves. The meal is done in assembly-line fashion -- throughout the evening, people walk into the dining hall, sit down, get a banana leaf placed in front of them, servers come along and place small quantities of a dozen or so different kinds of food on the banana leaf. They chow down quickly, using their hands, flip the leaf over to indicate they are finished, and leave, making room for the next group of people. Definitely not a leisurely dining experience!

The reception is frequently held before the wedding ceremony. In this wedding, the reception was Thursday night, and the marriage ceremony was Friday morning. The reception consists essentially of the bride and groom posing for formal photographs with just about every person who attends the wedding (at right), while the wedding guests one by one offer their congratulations. All of the photographs are very stiff and formal poses; there is no touching, and few people smile.

 The bride and groom at the reception

Comments

[shannon clubb]

Once again, I must tell you how I savor the moments of your journals for my learning experience. Thanks Basia!

[Selvin Dhavidhu]

Hi Basia, I love the pictures taken by you. It seems that you love India the same way I do. Well in marriage ceremony, most of the times, only the bride's brother wash the feet of groom and the groom will gift any gold jewels to him. I don't know how or why small kids wash the feet of groom.

Then regarding that umbrella symbolism: there is no meaning behind that. South India is hot so they hold umbrella just to protect the groom from the hot sun.

There is a meaning in the way we fold the banana leave. People close the banana leave by holding the upper part of the leave and fold it. It means I want to continue the relationship. If you hold the bottom part and fold it, that would mean "you don't want the relationship with the host"